Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Don't even think about naming your kid "Lolita" or "Mona Lisa" in Portugal. Those names are on a hit list kept on the Ministry of Justice's website, together with "Guevara," "Marx," and "Rosa Luxemburgo."

The site has 39 pages of legally acceptable first names, and 41 pages of banned monikers. Some are seeking to scrap the national list, as Norway has done. In Norway, you can choose any name for your child, except "swear words, sex words, negative names and sicknesses."

So what's wrong with naming your kid "Malaria"?

“What it does is handicap a kid who has to deal with it,” said Albert Mehrabian, a University of California professor emeritus of psychology and author of “Baby Name Report Card: Beneficial and Harmful Baby Names.”

Some parents are capable of labours of lunacy. Portugal’s reject list includes Ovnis. OVNI is Portuguese for UFO.

Danish authorities nixed Monkey and Lucifer. Mehrabian knows of an American named Latrina. [Link]